Posts tagged "Metadata"

Learn to use Bridge CC to efficiently manage and organize media assets of all kinds. Adobe evangelist Julieanne Kost shows how to download photos from a camera into Bridge, rename the files, add metadata, and view, rate, and label photos. She also shows how to share the best images with filters and collections, and showcase them in slideshows.

Although you can use the Metadata filter to quickly find files based on capture date, if you already have an image selected and are looking to view other images captured on that same date, clicking the arrow icon to the right of the Capture Date in the Metadata panel will quickly filter the entire library (based on the capture date of the selected image).

Lightroom can display up to three different dates for a file in the Metadata panel: Date Time Original, Date Time Digitized and Date Time. Note: try setting the Metadata panel’s preset to EXIF to display them all. Here’s the explanation of when and why you might need these different dates:

• Date Time Original – This is the moment in time that is shown in the picture. In other words, if you were at a new year’s eve party last year and took a picture at one minute before midnight, the Date Time Original of that picture is 12/31/2012 11:59 PM.

• Date Time Digitized – This is the moment in time at which the picture was committed to digital form. For photos from a digital camera, this will always be identical to Date Time Original. For film, it wouldn’t be. For example, if you’d taken that new year’s eve picture on film, then waited exactly six months to scan (i.e., digitize) the film the Date Time Original would still be 12/31/2012 11:59 PM, but the Date Time Digitized would be 6/30/2013 11:59 PM.

• Date Time – This is the file creation date. Again, for a picture from a digital camera that you haven’t mucked with, this will be identical to the previous two fields. But if you generate a new file from the picture (using covert to DNG, as in your example, or via other means such as creating a PSD by editing in Photoshop) then this field will show the date on which the new file was created. In other words, if you edited your new year’s eve picture in Photoshop at noon today, generating a new PSD in the process, the Date Time for the new file would be today’s date 12pm.

For most ordinary people shooting with a digital camera, the only field they care about is Date Time Original, and the only reason to ever edit it is if the clock on their camera was set incorrectly for some reason when they took the picture. For example, if you’d traveled from California to New York for that new year’s party, and forgot to adjust your camera’s clock to account for the time zone change, then that picture you took would show a Date Time Original of 12/31/2012 8:59 PM. Since you know that’s not correct, you would probably want to edit the capture time and use the “Shift by a set number of hours” option to move the Date Time Original field ahead by three hours.

In this episode of The Complete Picture (How to change Capture time in Lightroom 5), Julieanne demonstrates two ways to change the capture time of your images. The first enables you to offset a time zone change and the second supports a custom adjustment to align multiple cameras used to shoot one event but with different date/time settings in-camera.

Lightroom can understand changes made in Bridge and Camera Raw (such as the addition of metadata like copyright and contact information as well as enhancements made using ACR such as modifications made to Color Temperature or Exposure). By default however, if you open a file in Bridge and make changes to the Metadata, Lightroom will NOT automatically update the Metadata. Instead, Lightroom displays an icon warning that the file has been changed by an external application.

Lightroom displays an icon to notifying us that changes have been made to these files in an external application.

You can then choose whether or not you want to use the updated Metadata from Bridge/Camera Raw or use the information in Lightroom’s database. To update the file with the external application’s Metadata, click the icon and choose “Import Settings from Disk” (or select the file in the Grid view and choose Metadata > Read Metadata from File). If the information in the Lightroom database is correct, choose Overwrite Settings.

Note: Additional software applications that follow the XMP standard should also be able to read/write Lightroom and Photoshop’s metadata.

Lightroom automatically saves the original file name in the metadata of the file. In the Metadata panel, (in the header area where you can choose from a number of different ways to display the panel), choose the “EXIF and IPTC” or “Location” display options and you will see the “Original Filename” filed.

By default, when creating Virtual Copies, Lightroom automatically gives each Virtual Copy a sequential copy name: “Copy 1”, “Copy 2”, “Copy 3”, etc. To create a custom name for each Virtual Copy, in the Metadata panel (in the Library module) type the preferred name in the “Copy Name” field.

Note: to see the custom file name in the Grid or Loupe views, you may need to make a change under View >View Options. In the example below, I have set my view options to “Show Grid Extras: Expanded Cells” and my “Expanded Cell Extras” to “Copy Name or File Base Name”. Note that you can also choose to see both Copy and File name.

For more information on Virtual Copies, you may want to watch this video tutorial.

Occasionally I need to remove IPTC metadata from a file when I demo Photoshop and Lightroom. In order to do this quickly, I’ve created a metadata template which has blank fields AND a check to the right of each field. When applied, Lightroom replaces the metadata that I entered in the previous demo with the “blank” data so that I can demonstrate adding it again.

Be careful with this one – I once wiped out an entire years worth of keywords that I had applied.

When you create a file naming template, inserting tokens (such as Date, Image Name and Metadata), tells Lightroom to use that information (on a file-by-file basis) from the metadata of each individual file. If you prefer to enter your own information, either type it directly into the text entree box (this embeds it as part of the template), or add the Custom Text token (which will allow you to create a template which gives you the opportunity to enter custom text like a client name without having to edit the template).

• Command + Option + Shift + K (Mac) | Control + Alt + Shift + K (Win) will display the Set Keyword Shortcuts dialog box where you can set the Painters tool’s keyword. Then, with the Painter tool, simply click on any image in the Grid view to apply that keyword. Click-drag across multiple images to apply the keyword to several images.

• If the painter tool is set to apply keywords, Shift + K will remove the Painter tool’s keyword from the image.

Finally, Option + 1-9 (Mac) | Alt + 1-9 (Win) applies keywords from a keyword set when using the number pad on an extended keyboard. Holding the Option + (Mac) | Alt (Win) key displays the numeric shortcuts next to the Keyword Set so that you can see which number will apply what keyword.

In Lightroom you can mark a keyword so that it doesn’t export by double clicking on the keyword in the Keyword panel and unchecking Include on Export. This may come in handy when using hierarchical keywords. For example, you might have France, Germany and Italy all under the parent keyword “Countries” to make them easy to find. However you don’t necessarily want the “Countries” keyword to be exported.

At this point some of you might be thinking of adding a “nickname” for your client – perhaps something that you wouldn’t want them to see. If you want my advice – don’t do it. Seriously, accidents happen.

Unfortunately, the Slideshow module cannot automatically wrap text. Therefore, if you have entered a long caption and want to display that caption under an image, the text will (more than likely) end up being truncated – unless you scale the caption really small. To avoid this, insert your own line breaks (in the Caption field in the Metadata panel) using Option + Enter (Mac), Ctrl+Return (Win).